


Psychopathy: The Neuroscience of Hannibal Lecter

by DeathValleyQueen (DjaqtheRipper)



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Essay, Gen, Nonfiction, neuroscience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:42:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23297227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DjaqtheRipper/pseuds/DeathValleyQueen
Summary: An article on the neuroscience behind the psychopathology of Hannibal Lecter, written for my Neuroscience and the Law course.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Psychopathy: The Neuroscience of Hannibal Lecter

**Author's Note:**

> The footnotes got cut out, so here are the footnotes:  
> 1\. John Seabrook, Suffering Souls: The search for the roots of psychopathy, NEW YORKER, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/10/suffering-souls (Nov. 3, 2008) (last accessed Mar. 8, 2020); Robert James R. Blair, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Psychopathy and Implications for Judgments of Responsibility, 1 NEUROETHICS 149-157 (2008).  
> 2\. Seabrook, id.  
> 3\. Jim Edwards, ‘The Hare Psychopathy Checklist’: The test that will tell you if someone is a sociopath.  
> 4\. The magnets began to “quench” due to a failure in the helium cooling system, suspiciously, shortly after Lecter arrived in the facility.  
> 5\. Blair, supra note 1.

Neuroscience and the Law Response Paper:  
Psychopathy Reading Response—  
Case Study of Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter

In response to the two psychopathy readings I wanted to perform a case study and evaluation of a fictional character—Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter from Thomas Harris’ novels, their film adaptations, and the NBC television adaptation Hannibal. I will use the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) that Dr. Robert Hare formulated and that Dr. Kent Kiehl uses in his prison research, as discussed in the New Yorker article. The most comprehensive version of the PCL-R that I could find without paying for access was in a Business Insider article, which I cross-referenced in other literature and found to be fairly thorough. Though Hare believes that only a licensed clinician should use these criteria to perform a case study, I think the fact that it is being performed on a fictional character would dissuade any concerns he may have about the consequences of a non-licensed non-clinician using the checklist.   
I. BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION  
In order to apply the PCL-R, one must begin with a biographic understanding of one’s subject. As Dr. Kiehl applies this, he looks to the subjects’ criminal histories as a starting point. Accordingly, I will begin with a brief summary of Dr. Lecter’s life before I commence the analysis of his personality traits using the PCL-R. The history shall be compiled using a combination of the novel series canon in addition to film and television adaptations.  
Hannibal Lecter was born in Lithuania during the Second World War to affluent parents. He was the oldest of two children, the younger being his sister Mischa, of whom he was very fond. He often tried to appease his baby sister by bringing her gifts, such as an eggplant in her favorite shade of purple, and by drawing her bubble baths, where he would use his mother’s silver hoop bracelet to create large bubbles for her to play with. By all accounts the two were very close.   
After the Eastern front fell, Lecter’s parents were killed and his home, including himself and his sister Mischa, was taken over by two renegades. After winter fell and trapped the four in Lecter Castle without food, the renegades resorted to cannibalism, killing and devouring Mischa and forcing Lecter to eat her as well. Presumably, thus began Lecter’s long history of cannibalism.  
After the war ended, a young Lecter was sent to live with his aunt, the Lady Murasaki, in France. Lady Murasaki was a force of moral guidance for the teenaged Lecter, and the two became quite close, sharing a love of beauty, the arts, and Japanese swordplay. However, when Lady Murasaki was insulted in front of Lecter by a butcher in the marketplace, he sought revenge and tortured then killed the butcher, preparing his body as a meal for himself and Lady Murasaki. This began an obsession with rudeness, and Lecter began to kill those he perceived to be rude, and then eat them, in what he viewed to be a sort of rightful transcendence for their actions.  
This first murder during his formative adolescent years, led to a desire to get revenge for his sister’s murder. Lecter began to hunt down, torture, kill, and eat all of the renegades who had been responsible for his sister’s death. This led to a falling out between Lecter and Murasaki, and at the end of his adolescence, Lecter left Europe for America. In America, he attended Johns Hopkins University and studied medicine, becoming an emergency room surgeon. During this time he continued with his philosophy of “eat the rude,” throwing lavish dinner parties for high-society friends and feeding them the beautifully prepared bodies of his victims.  
Eventually, Lecter decided he wanted to become a psychiatrist and he began to manipulate his psychiatric patients to name him in their wills, after which point he would kill and devour them, meanwhile obtaining vast sums of money in the process. After some time as a psychiatrist, and after a near-arrest, Lecter began helping the FBI as a criminal profiler. It was in this capacity that he met Will Graham, an FBI Special Agent and FBI Academy instructor with extreme empathy, which allowed him to effectively catch criminals but also made him vulnerable to psychological stress. At this time, Lecter emerged from inactivity and began hunting victims again, largely due to the thrill of misleading Graham and the FBI. As Graham’s psychiatric state deteriorated, Lecter framed him for all of Lecter’s murders, thus incarcerating Will Graham instead of Lecter.  
Eventually, Graham regained stability and was able to capture and incarcerate Lecter, at great personal loss. Lecter was acquitted by reason of insanity and sent to the (fictional) Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Presumably, due to the highly public nature of his crimes, manhunt, arrest, and acquittal, Lecter was a prime candidate for research and was sent to Western New Mexico Penitentiary, where he is the subject of Dr. Kiehl’s MRI and PCL-R studies. Due to an error with the magnets in the MRI , imagery of Lecter’s brain is not available at this time. As a result, this analysis will focus on the PCL-R results.

II. THE CASE STUDY  
This part of the research will look at findings from R.J.R. Blair’s article, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Psychopathy and Implications for Judgments of Responsibility. In this article, Blair establishes several features of psychopathy: increased risk of instrumental and reactive aggression, reduced emotional responsiveness, genetic risks brought out by social disadvantage or early trauma, and neural dysfunction in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). The neural dysfunction is characterized by a lack of fear response to adverse stimuli and a lack of ability to perceive sad or hurt facial expressions in others. Blair argues that people with all these traits (“psychopaths”) have diminished responsibility due to their inability to understand consequences of their actions.  
Lecter’s biographic history suggests that early childhood trauma—in the form of the deaths of his parents and having to partake in the cannibalization of his sister at the alternate risk of starvation—likely brought out the genetic factors of antisocial behavior that Lecter was predisposed to, due to inherited lack of emotional response. Lecter has a long history of both instrumental and reactive aggression—instrumental, in the form of manipulation of his patients, including Graham—and reactive, in regard to the murders of those he perceived to be rude. It is likely that even Lecter’s instances of reactive aggression were in some way instrumental— that is, Lecter is highly goal-seeking and even his reactive aggressions are ultimately goal-oriented, driven by a desire to “eat the rude.” Lecter experiences reduced emotional responsiveness, which is likely required in order to commit the crime he has committed. He does not see human beings as anything more than “swine” in many cases, likely due to reduced emotional understanding. He has had only three positive emotional relationships in his life and in each of those relationships he has shown great cruelty to the other participants: he ate his sister, he entangled Lady Muraksaki in his crimes and forced her to cover for him, and he falsely framed and incarcerated his only friend, Will Graham.  
Lecter is highly responsive to the adverse risk of becoming imprisoned, but rather than discourage him from partaking in additional murder and cannibalism, he uses it as an excuse to embroil others in his schemes and hurt them further, particularly in the case of Will Graham. It is likely that Lecter experiences some fundamental misunderstanding of consequences due to neural abnormalities in the amygdala and vmPFC, as his response to the threat of imprisonment or death is to dig himself deeper, so to speak, until he is in a position to act out an instrumental aggression, which Blair would say he is more highly disposed to do. In short, using Blair’s analysis, Lecter very likely lacks the correct neural responses to social and fear stimuli, and therefore has a compromised ability to make decisions, especially when those decisions are in response to social or fear stimuli, such as the risk of incarceration. Accordingly, Lecter has diminished responsibility.  
III. THE PCL-R  
1\. Do you have "excess glibness" or superficial charm?  
a. 2  
2\. Do you have a grandiose sense of self-worth?  
a. 2  
3\. Do you have an excess need for stimulation or proneness to boredom?  
a. 2  
4\. Are you a pathological liar?  
a. 1  
5\. Are you conning or manipulative?  
a. 2  
6\. Do you display a lack of remorse or guilt?  
a. 2  
7\. Do you have "shallow affect"?  
a. 0  
8\. Are you callous, or do you lack empathy?  
a. 2  
9\. Do you have a "parasitic lifestyle"?  
a. 1  
10\. Do you have poor behavioral controls?  
a. 0  
11\. Do you have a history of promiscuous sexual behavior?  
a. 0  
12\. Do you have a history of early behavioral problems?  
a. 2  
13\. Do you lack realistic long-term goals?  
a. 0  
14\. Are you overly impulsive?  
a. 0  
15\. Do you have a high level of irresponsibility?  
a. 0  
16\. Do you fail to accept responsibility for your own actions?  
a. 2  
17\. Have you had many short-term "marital" relationships?  
a. 0  
18\. Do you have a history of juvenile delinquency?  
a. 2  
19\. Have you ever experienced a "revocation of conditional release"?  
a. 0  
20\. Do you display "criminal versatility”?  
a. 2  
TOTAL: 22  
I have scored Lecter using a range of 0-2, as Hare and Kiehl do. He has a total score of 22, well below the upper-thirties range of Kiehl’s “psychopaths.” However, looking at these questions, there is a focus on reactive aggression and little room for the increased instrumental regression that Blair cites as evidence of psychopathy. Under Blair’s criteria, Lecter is a psychopath, but under Hare and Kiehl’s criteria, he is not. For Lecter, instrumental aggression is key. He is able to carry out his aggressions when it suits him, and in a way that will not let him be caught. Blair’s psychopath is far more dangerous than Hare and Kiehl’s, and yet their criteria is more widely used and has had more bearing on the literature. It is interesting to note that under the widest-used criteria for finding a psychopath, Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter, one of the widest recognized bad guys in American fiction, is not a psychopath.


End file.
